The mental health 'red flag' that crops up every time Trump speaks: psychologist

There has been no shortage of concerns raised about the mental and physical well-being of President Donald Trump, and now a doctor says the Commander in Chief’s increasingly erratic behavior and tendency to repeat himself raise “red flags” about his health.

Last month, Dr. Henry David Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, was one of 36 leading medical experts who signed a letter to Congress warning that Trump may be mentally unfit to serve. According to the Daily Beast, “While they did not provide a specific diagnosis, they came to their conclusion that he’s on a dangerous decline after observing him publicly.” Now, Dr. Abraham — who has been looking into Trump’s performance over the past 40 years for mental abnormalities — is raising concerns about a specific aspect of the president’s behavior.

Per the Daily Beast, “While he described the president, 79, as always narcissistic and sociopathic, he believes Trump has been exhibiting regression in his ability to manage language and is deeply concerned that Americans do not have a full picture of the president’s health. Abraham observed that the president’s speeches have gotten shorter and that he’s introduced a ‘pathological technique of perseveration,’ which is the repetition of actions or verbal patterns. Trump has taken to frequently returning to the same lines from his attacks on perceived political foes to frequently touting his own cognitive tests, among other brags.”

“It’s a red flag,” explained Abraham. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

According to Dr. Abraham, while Trump once did his best to court the press, his increasingly explosive behavior suggests an inability to “internalize certain control over his language.” What’s more, he sees in Trump further evidence of disorientation and verbal confusion, such as the president’s repeated mix-up of Greenland and Iceland in a single speech earlier this year.

“Not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night,” said Abraham.

While Trump has attempted to explain away his bizarre speaking tendencies as “the weave,” in which he intentionally rambles across topics, “Abraham warned that the president’s claim was simply an attempt to rationalize tangential thinking, which is abnormal. He said an increase in the frequency of the so-called ‘weave’ was ‘absolutely’ a bad sign of things to come.”

In the letter to Congress, Abraham and his colleagues raised concerns that Trump’s spiraling mental decline has serious implications for the country, and have called for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. According to the Daily Beast, “Abraham warned that the list of potential conditions Trump has, or a complex differential diagnosis, could range all the way from the need for more sleep to a president who is suffering dementia, or some other serious problem ‘that threatens the world.’”

“I think what we’re missing in this whole story is medical transparency,” Abraham said. “The safety of the country and the world has to be given a higher priority than whether or not the president has the right of confidentiality to his medical records.”

“This is not normal,” he concluded. “This is dangerous. And worse, this is a man who has access to nuclear weapons.”

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